Joe Burke (March 18, 1884 – June 9, 1950) was an American composer and pianist. He partnered with some great lyricists: Benny Davis (“Carolina Moon”), Walter Donaldson (“Just the Same”), and Joseph McCarthy (“Rambling Rose”). However, the partners he had the most successes with were Al Dubin (“Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, “I’m Painting the Clouds with Sunshine”, “For You”) and Edgar Leslie (“On Treasure Island”, “A Little Bit Independent”, “In a Little Gypsy Tea Room”, “Moon Over Miami”, “It Looks Like Rain on Cherry Blossom Lane”). (More from Wikipedia)
In Tiny Tim’s version, “Tiptoe through the Tulips” came off as a novelty song, but that is certainly not how the song started out. Written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke, “Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me” was a featured song in an historic film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway and became a #1 hit recording by one of the film’s stars, the “crooning troubadour” and guitarist Nick Lucas later that year. Only the second all-color “talkie” film (and using an early version of the Technicolor process), it quickly became the best-selling film of all time that year, a record that it held for 10 years until eclipsed by (you guessed it) Gone with the Wind. (Sadly, Gold Diggers of Broadway is now a partially lost film; the loose remake, Gold Diggers of 1933 is better known these days).
(March 2013)
